it’s been a long time since i’ve “completed” a warioware title, and the reason is that warioware D.I.Y. for DS was next in line and i’m not really into games that focus on creativity since i’m not very artistic, and when i’m playing a game i’d rather just be playing a game than creating. anyway, before i get into warioware D.I.Y., it’s pretty much impossible not to talk about that game without mentioning its well-known predecessor mario paint on SNES. i’d never played mario paint, so i gave it a quick spin. one thing mario paint was famous for was introducing the SNES mouse and basically has three modes: a cute and cartoony version of photoshop in which you can create still images and animations; a cute and cartoony composer mode in which you can create music with a maximum of three notes at a time; and a bonus mini-game called “gnat attack” (aka “coffee break” or “fly swatter”) in which you navigate the mouse around to swat at flies and other enemies. i enjoyed my time with mario paint and it’s cute and colorful, but a big drawback to the game (and a deal-breaker by modern standards) is that you can only save one image and otherwise there’s now way to save your results other than record it to a video recorder via your TV, or utilize modern means, such as an emulator’s save states.

as for warioware D.I.Y., i dove into playing through the mini-games first, and these are the typical warioware fare. the game focuses on touchscreen controls and in that sense is very much like warioware: touched, although the games feel somewhat average in general, although that could just be that the formula has worn thin. before long i was exploring what the rest of the game has to offer, which includes 4-panel comics to read that unlock daily, many of which are quite entertaining (albeit fairly surreal), and a listening center. on the creative side the game includes a comic strip maker and a music maker (with a max of 4 simultaneous notes + 1 rhythm track instead of mario paint‘s 3).

the game offers multiple ways to ease you into the main event, microgame creation: one way is the “jobs” section, where you can take on tasks to replace artwork from microgames (taken from the original warioware title, i believe). the photoshop-like art creator, which is pretty much the same in all the modes, is similar to mario paint‘s, and is equally cute and colorful and similarly surprisingly deep. the game also provides three in-depth tutorials to take you through increasingly complex ways of creating objects and programming simple interactions in order to create your game. after working through some of the microgame creation it becomes clearer why the pre-made microgames feel more basic than usual, because you can actually import any of them and modify them as you like to create your own version. this is a great way to get into the creation without having to start from scratch, and also a great way to learn how the game programming works since you can see how other microgames were set up. the game also includes stamps that you can use in lieu of having to create your own artwork, which is also helpful for people without much in the way of artistic skills.

when the game was originally released, the wi-fi connection features were a big part of the interactivity, with new microgames made available on a regular basis (some by famous real-world game developers themselves) and contests were held to make a microgame that matched a given theme. it’s too bad those features were available for such a short time, since the game came out at the tail end of the DS’s cycle (just a year before the 3DS was released). the game also features interactivity with the wiiware title warioware D.I.Y. showcase, where you can transfer your creations (or any of the other microgames) from your DS to the wii to play with the wiimote (another reason why the microgames were more simplistic, since they had to be compatible with the wiimote’s point-and-click capabilities). i haven’t sat down and played through that yet, but prob. will in the near future.

all in all mario paint, although regarded as a classic, seems fairly superseded by warioware D.I.Y.. the latter provides many more capabilities as well as plenty of options to save your games, although still no ability to export to anything outside of your DS or wii. although i enjoyed my time with the game, i’m not really the intended target since i’m not really into being creative within my gaming time, but otherwise this is an easy recommendation to people who are looking for that kind of experience.

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next up in the contra series for me was contra III: the alien wars for SNES. [back to back SNES games? what’s the world coming to??] like many other franchises that originated pre-SNES, contra 3 really feels like a leap forward, with a huge improvement in the graphics and sound. the core gameplay is as solid as ever, although my enjoyment of the game was hampered by the lack of a 30-man code (which, completely mystifyingly, was in the original japanese release but was removed for the north american release). the game’s options allow you to set your lives to be up to 7, and as a series first it includes three levels of difficulty.

aside from this significant handicap (although perhaps this is just konami’s way of telling us we’ve gotten to expect too much coddling from the other contra games), the game unfortunately has a few other issues as well. there’s an impressive number of boss and sub-boss battles, but some of them require far too much “try and die” playing; the last boss is a particularly egregious example. the game also includes two top-down levels, which have never been a strong point in the series for me, and they’re similarly dull here. there’s also a stage that takes place on motorcycles that is a great idea that could’ve been better executed.

despite this niggling, the game is a definite classic. there’s a lot of variety within each level and the additions to the gameplay are great, and the game features numerous set pieces, including navigating rails with one arm and shooting with the other; all the weapons are wholly worthwhile (now featuring bombs, the new flamethrower, and the ability to switch between two weapons); and the co-op gameplay is as much fun as ever, although, again, the enjoyment is hampered by the game’s difficulty. the action gets pretty intense, although there’s rarely any slowdown. all in all this is an SNES classic that, despite its difficulty, is a definite high point for the series. looking to the future it seems that many of the subsequent releases were less than impressive, but it will be interesting to see how the series has evolved.

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i haven’t been motivated to play anything even remotely taxing for a while, but hopefully i’m over my summer slump. this week i finally “finished” a game that i’ve been slogging through off and on for ages, the original chrono trigger for SNES. over the years i’ve realized i’m really not much into RPGs in general, but as one of the most lauded games of all time i felt compelled to check it out. as you might have guessed, i clearly didn’t love the game, and although i grew to quite like “the other” mega-popular SNES RPG classic, final fantasy 3 (i.e. FF6), when i played it a couple of years ago, the needle of my interest in chrono trigger rarely moved past mere tolerance.

the ardent devotion for the game among its legion of fans (evidenced by any number of reviews, such as this one at nintendolife.com) may in part be due to simple nostalgia and in part to elements that can only be appreciated by fans of RPGs, but jeremy parish’s look back on gamespite.net (in which he posits that the game combines the best elements of the FF and dragon quest series) does a good job of providing some historical context and highlighting the game’s innovations.

first off, the revamped ATB battle system takes the system from FF6 and adds combo attacks on top of it. the game is so mindlessly easy overall that i didn’t even bother with combo attacks until late in the game when i actually had to start strategizing during battles, and in retrospect i should’ve at least tried each of them out. the game auto-levels the characters you’re not currently using, so i probably also should’ve experimented with the other characters and combinations instead of just sticking to a core group as i usually do (in my case, crono, frog, and marle). the seamless transition between dungeon crawling and battling is very well done and keeps the game moving forward, but the much-touted claim that “random battles are optional” since you can see the enemies onscreen and choose to engage or not is completely false for the majority of the latter parts of the game where literally every battle you fight is a mandatory surprise attack. likewise, exploiting the enemy’s physical positioning when choosing your attacks is completely underutilized.

aside from the battle mechanics which i found less than engaging (which i’ve come to realize is pretty much the sole determiner of whether or not i’ll enjoy an RPG since you spend 90% of an RPG battling), the game is also known for its sidequests, multiple endings (which personally didn’t interest me much at all), and completely novel “new game +” mechanic in which you can carry over all your stats, equipment, and items of a completed game to a second playthrough. i didn’t investigate the latter elements at all, and although the game lets you attempt to beat the final boss early on it seems pointless on a normal playthrough since your characters aren’t going to be at a high enough level. i completed only a few of the obvious sidequests since apparently many of the others require you to fly around and track down what new areas have appeared and then trigger certain events by using certain characters. as i’ve come to realize is often the case, the final dungeon is a dull, drawn-out affair, and i was exceedingly annoyed that the final boss is so much more difficult than the entire rest of the game, so much so that i refuse to grind to finish the game and have set the game aside indefinitely.

this isn’t to say that i didn’t enjoy the game in general, to some extent. the music is quite good and the graphics are memorable. the time travel hook is unique, although, again, the past-future causality elements are somewhat minimal, which makes me interested in trying and comparing the well-received recent DS RPG release radiant historia which seems to more fully use time travel as its central mechanic. i found the characters and the story to be reasonably engaging, although even given the fact i played this game in fits and starts the story seemed to be presented in a piecemeal fashion.

so it seems this is another classic that i found to just be dated. glad i can finally cross this off my list, and hopefully i’ll be working my way through the last handful of all-time classics i have left sooner than later.

i’d been trying to get motivated to spend time with the original f-zero for SNES for ages. i’d really loved f-zero GX when i’d played it a few years ago, but although i had tried out the SNES version a few times it really hadn’t drawn me in. i finally gave it a fair amount of time recently, and although it’s technically impressive and for the most part i enjoyed the “beginner” and “standard” levels of difficulty (the exception would be the suddenly much more difficult final track of the last cup, called “fire field”), i came away just being frustrated by the difficulty. which is a bit odd, since i thoroughly enjoyed GX, often cited as one of the hardest games of all time.

it’s quite possible the mario kart series is to blame, since with those games it’s not too hard to win even with a few mistakes and if you really screw up there’s still a chance that you can make a comeback with a much-needed item. there’s a high probability that i’ve gotten “softer” and more impatient in my old age, but i think a better explanation is that the difficulty in f-zero just seems unfair in some crucial ways. videogamecritic.net’s review is a bit overly harsh in general, but i have to agree with him that the “pinball physics” is the main thing that makes the game incredibly frustrating. the extreme bounciness of your vehicle is problematic when running into walls just due to careless driving, even when using the heavier machines, but when that’s coupled with the aggressive CPU drivers at the higher levels who will purposely drive into you the entire game becomes annoying. on top of that the slow drivers who just get in the way also drive more erratically at these levels of difficulty and will suddenly swerve into your path so that avoiding them becomes more a matter of luck than skill. ugh. the higher levels also emphasize having to pass rival cars more, which again just leads to random messy pileups more often than not. the key feature that GX includes (and that apparently originated in its predecessor, f-zero X) is the ability to attack other vehicles so that you actually have protection against the other drivers instead of solely having to react to their jostling and hope for the best.

on the plus side, the game, like GX, does give a great sense of speed and the framerate is silky smooth. it features some hazards that GX didn’t have, and the track layouts in general are pretty interesting and have a good amount of variety. the visuals, made possible by the much-touted mode 7 effects, are quite good for the SNES era, and extremely impressive considering it was a launch title, although some of the sound effects, including the acceleration sound, are rather grating. it’s also quite an impressive debut for a series that, although it hasn’t seen a lot of action recently, i’ll be continuing to work my way through. that definitely won’t be for a while, though; even though f-zero X is much more like GX than the original, i’m definitely going to have to take a long break before climbing back into the blue falcon’s driver’s seat.

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it feels like it’s been a little while since i’ve played a pac-man game. actually i’ve played a few off and on, but i haven’t sat down and “finished” one in a while. one game that i’ve come back to several times but finally sat down and spent a concentrated amount of time with was pac-attack, as it appears as part of pac-man collection for GBA (a SNES version was also released, and a version also appears as a bonus (in a remade version) in pac-man world 2 for gamecube and other platforms). this is the third game of that set of four that i’ve played, and of the four it’s the one that suffers least from being scaled down to the GBA’s tiny screen. unlike the other three games in the collection which are based on the classic maze-based pac-man gameplay, pac-attack is actually a tetris-esque puzzler and as a result doesn’t have to rely on a tiny zoomed-out perspective or a board divided across multiple screens.

i haven’t played much of the other versions, but on the GBA the game looks great and not painfully small. lest you think it’s a mediocre tetris clone, let me be quick to say that the game is actually one of the better tetris-based puzzlers, and for me ranks closely behind the classics panel de pon (aka tetris attack) and puyo puyo. despite it being similarly addictive, the game isn’t nearly as immediately gratifying, and the pace of it feels slower, in part due to the fact it doesn’t really have any combo system. instead, the game provides three-character blocks which consist of all blocks or all ghosts, some combination of ghosts and blocks, or a pac-man plus two blocks, and its main objective is to line up a trail of ghosts and then unleash your pac-man to gobble them up and cause the subsequent falling blocks to form rows. since a block containing a pac-man comes regularly (every fifth block), when forming long chains of ghosts part of the task is to discard the pac-men you don’t need while not screwing up the big score you’re creating. also, it seems a bit counterintuitive, but eating a long chain of ghosts doesn’t seem to net you a lot of points; rather, your focus has to be on the blocks falling into place into rows after you’ve cleared the ghosts. this obscured objective definitely makes the game harder to get into. also, the strategy for placing the blocks is itself more like games such as pipe dreams where blocks have functions as end pieces or middle pieces (in this case, of a string of ghosts), and again, having to think about these uses of the blocks while positioning them does make the core gameplay more of an effort than most others.

still, once you absorb the nuances of the gameplay the game is quite fun. but even though the gameplay is solid and satisfyingly challenging, even after playing for many enjoyable hours the game just doesn’t quite reach the level of the greats. like games like wario woods, pac-attack is fun but the mechanics are just a bit too fussy. nevertheless, i enjoyed my time spent with it and feel my skillz definitely have room to grow. i achieved a high score just shy of 500,000 so i’ll definitely be picking it up again at some point to at least break that barrier.

i’d played the paper mario game for gamecube, so playing mario RPG was a definite step back. the game originated the subsequent spin-off series’ action commands during battle, but despite getting to play as certain members of the mario universe for the first time (although there is one painful omission), the rest of the game played out with very few surprises. as i’ve found with the other mario RPGs, it always feels a bit weird and unnatural to have characters other than the familiar ones we know and love from the classic platformers, although for this game square did a pretty good job of coming up with a host of new enemies and side characters that integrate well enough. i’m not a fan of mini-games and sidequests, but the game made them tolerable by keeping them in the background for the most part. and the general level of easiness of the game (with the exception of the beginning, which is actually a bit harder than you’d expect) ensures that level grinding is never an issue. as with other RPGs although you do get 5 characters to play with, there’s really never any motivation to use the two you don’t want to, although it is nice that the characters you don’t use level up the same as if they had participated in battle.

the biggest drawback for me was the annoyance of having platformer-type stages thrown in every once in a while. while i thoroughly enjoy platformers in general, the isometric view more often than not makes it frustratingly difficult to tell where ledges, etc. actually are supposed to be or how far you should jump, and there’s way too much “try and die” gameplay involved. ugh.

not much more to say. i’ve already checked out some of the other mario RPGs, and although i’m finding them on the whole to be only marginally more interesting than the average RPG, they do tend to be packed with charm and that special brand of nintendo whimsy. i’m really looking forward to seeing my main man ‘uigi team up with his older bro and delving more into the paper mario series as well, so perhaps i’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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although i’ve played a few of the spin-offs, i’ve never actually played the classic, original street fighter II in the arcade. one of these days i’ll have to track down a machine, but in the meantime i did the next best thing, which was to play one of the three versions of the game that hit the SNES. it was a bit confusing to figure out which SNES game corresponds to which arcade version, but once again wikipedia proved to be quite helpful with its listing of all of the various ports to home consoles. although i usually like to start with the original version of a game, in the case of SFII i figured the differences aren’t that significant, so i skipped over SFII: the world warrior and SFII turbo (aka hyper fighting) and dove into the version i had on hand which was the third and final release for SNES, super street fighter II: the new challengers. as with SFII turbo, in this game the four bosses are playable and there are selectable speeds, and it had several other additions, most notably the inclusion of four new characters (in particular, cammy who went on to become a series staple), as well as new colors for all the characters and the usual moveset tweaks.

having played previous SFII spin-offs i didn’t have to spend any time mastering the usual special attacks (although i fondly remember the time spent learning how to do a hadouken way back when). i spent most of my time with the classic ryu, and although i was familiar with his moveset and some of the other more well-known SFII characters, there were plenty of characters that i’d never really encountered in other games before. in particular i’d never really played against the bosses before, and although balrog and m. bison were pretty straightforward, vega and sagat required a bit more study. i didn’t play enough to really pwn the game and learn combos, and i somewhat missed the flashy super attacks that were added later, but i enjoyed the trip to the past and at some point i’ll definitely have to work my way through the sizable roster. there’s definitely no underestimating the impact SFII has had on the history of gaming, though, and even though capcom continues to churn out sequels year after year (which i have little to no interest in, not being a huge fan of fighters in general) it’s nice to go back and appreciate where it all began.